Are Fast-Breeder Reactors A Nuclear Power Panacea?

Plutonium is the nuclear nightmare. A by-product of conventional power-station reactors, it is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. And even when not made into bombs, it is a million-year radioactive waste legacy that is already costing the world billions of dollars a year to contain.

And yet, some scientists say, we have the technology to burn plutonium in a new generation of “fast” reactors. That could dispose of the waste problem, reducing the threat of radiation and nuclear proliferation, and at the same time generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy. It sounds too good to be true. So are the techno-optimists right — or should the conventional environmental revulsion at all things nuclear still hold?

Fast-breeder technology is almost as old as nuclear power. But after almost two decades in the wilderness, it could be poised to take off. The U.S. corporation GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) is promoting a reactor design called the PRISM (for Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular) that its chief consulting engineer and fast-breeder guru, Eric Loewen, says is a safe and secure way to power the world using yesterday’s nuclear waste.

The PRISM (Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular) reactor being developed by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy would consume spent nuclear fuel to generate electricity. A design such as this one is now being considered at Sellafield in the UK, with proponents saying it is an effective and safe way to recycle nuclear waste and critics charging it would be unsafe and expensive. (Courtesy of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy)

The company wants to try out the idea for the first time on the northwest coast of England, at the notorious nuclear dumping ground at Sellafield, which holds the world’s largest stock of civilian plutonium. At close to 120 tons, it stores more plutonium from reactors than the U.S. and Russia Britain’s huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. combined.

While most of the world’s civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is.

The Royal Society, Britain’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, reported last year that the plutonium powder, which is stored in drums, “poses a serious security risk” and “undermines the UK’s credibility in non-proliferation debates.”

Spent fuel, while less of an immediate proliferation risk, remains a major radiological hazard for thousands of years. The plutonium — the most ubiquitous and troublesome radioactive material inside spent fuel from nuclear reactors — has a half-life of 24,100 years. A typical 1,000-megawatt reactor produces 27 tons of spent fuel a year.

None of it yet has a home. If not used as a fuel, it will need to be kept isolated for thousands of years to protect humans and wildlife. Burial deep underground seems the obvious solution, but nobody has yet built a geological repository. Public opposition is high — as successive U.S. governments have discovered whenever the burial ground at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is discussed — and the cost of construction will be huge. So the idea of building fast reactors to eat up this waste is attractive — especially in Britain, but also elsewhere.

Theoretically at least, fast reactors can keep recycling their own fuel until all the plutonium is gone, generating electricity all the while. Britain’s huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, recently said British plutonium contains enough energy to run the country’s electricity grid for 500 years.

Fast reactors can be run in different ways, either to destroy plutonium, to maximise energy production, or to produce new plutonium. Under the PRISM proposal now being considered at Sellafield, plutonium destruction would be the priority. “We could deal with the plutonium stockpile in Britain in five years,” says Loewen. But equally, he says, it could generate energy, too. The proposed plant has a theoretical generating capacity of 600 megawatts.

Fast reactors could do the same for the U.S. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. launched a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership aimed at developing technologies to consume plutonium in spent fuel. But President Obama drastically cut the partnership’s funding, while also halting work on the planned Yucca Mountain geological repository. “We are left with a million-year problem,” says Loewen. “Right now there isn’t a policy framework in the U.S. for solving this issue.”

He thinks Britain’s unique problem with its stockpile of purified plutonium dioxide could break the logjam. “The UK is our best opportunity,” he told me. “We need someone with the technical confidence to do this.”

The PRISM fast reactor is attracting friends among environmentalists formerly opposed to nuclear power. They include leading thinkers such as Stewart Brand and British columnist George Monbiot. And, despite the cold shoulder from the Obama administration, some U.S. government officials seem quietly keen to help the British experiment get under way. They have approved the export of the PRISM technology to Britain and the release of secret technical information from the old research program. And the U.S. Export-Import Bank is reportedly ready to provide financing.

Britain has not made up its mind yet, however. Having decided to try and re-use its stockpile of plutonium dioxide, its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has embarked on a study to determine which re-use option to support. There is no firm date, but the decision, which will require government approval, should be reached within two years. Apart from a fast-breeder reactor, the main alternative is to blend the plutonium with other fuel to create a mixed-oxide fuel (mox) that will burn in conventional nuclear power plants.

Britain has a history of embarrassing failures with mox, including the closure last year of a $2 billion blending plant that spent 10 years producing a scant amount of fuel. And critics say that, even if it works properly, mox fuel is an expensive way of generating not much energy, while leaving most of the plutonium intact, albeit in a less dangerous form.

Only fast reactors can consume the plutonium. Many think that will ultimately be the UK choice. If so, the PRISM plant would take five years to license, five years to build, and could destroy probably the world’s most dangerous stockpile of plutonium by the end of the 2020s. GEH has not publicly put a cost on building the plant, but it says it will foot the bill, with Proponents of fast reactors see them as the nuclear application of one of the totems of environmentalism: recycling. the British government only paying by results, as the plutonium is destroyed.

The idea of fast breeders as the ultimate goal of nuclear power engineering goes back to the 1950s, when experts predicted that fast-breeders would generate all Britain’s electricity by the 1970s. But the Clinton administration eventually shut down the U.S.’s research program in 1994. Britain followed soon after, shutting its Dounreay fast-breeder reactor on the north coast of Scotland in 1995. Other countries have continued with fast-breeder research programs, including France, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Russia, which has been running a plant at Sverdlovsk for 32 years.

But now climate change, with its urgency to reduce fossil fuel use, and growing plutonium stockpiles have changed perspectives once again. The researchers’ blueprints are being dusted off. The PRISM design is based on the Experimental Breeder Reactor No 2, which was switched on at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in 1965 and ran for three decades.

Here is how conventional and fast reactors differ. Conventional nuclear reactors bombard atoms of uranium fuel with neutrons. Under this bombardment, the atoms split, creating more neutrons and energy. The neutrons head off to split more atoms, creating a chain reaction. Meanwhile, the energy heats a coolant passing through the reactor, such as water, which then generates electricity in conventional turbines.

The problem is that in this process only around 1 percent of the potential energy in the uranium fuel is turned into electricity. The rest remains locked up in the fuel, much of it in the form of plutonium, the chief by-product of the once-through cycle. The idea of fast reactors is to grab more of this energy from the spent fuel of the conventional reactor. And it can do this by repeatedly recycling the fuel through the reactor.

The second difference is that in a conventional reactor, the speed of the neutrons has to be slowed down to ensure the chain reactions occur. In a typical pressurized-water reactor, the water itself acts as this moderator. But in a fast reactor, as the name suggests, the best results for generating energy from the plutonium fuel are achieved by bombarding the neutrons much faster. This is done by substituting the water moderator with a liquid metal such as sodium.

Proponents of fast reactors see them as the nuclear application of one of the totems of environmentalism: recycling. But many technologists, and most environmentalists, are more skeptical.

The skeptics include Adrian Simper, the strategy director of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will be among those organizations deciding whether to back the PRISM plan. Simper warned last November in Critics argue that plutonium being prepared for recycling ‘would be dangerously vulnerable to theft or misuse.’ an internal memorandum that fast reactors were “not credible” as a solution to Britain’s plutonium problem because they had “still to be demonstrated commercially” and could not be deployed within 25 years.

The technical challenges include the fact that it would require converting the plutonium powder into a metal alloy, with uranium and zirconium. This would be a large-scale industrial activity on its own that would create “a likely large amount of plutonium-contaminated salt waste,” Simper said.

Simper is also concerned that the plutonium metal, once prepared for the reactor, would be even more vulnerable to theft for making bombs than the powdered oxide. This view is shared by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S., which argues that plutonium liberated from spent fuel in preparation for recycling “would be dangerously vulnerable to theft or misuse.”

GEH says Simper is mistaken and that the technology is largely proven. That view seems to be shared by MacKay, who oversees the activities of the decommissioning authority.

The argument about proliferation risk boils down to timescales. In the long term, burning up the plutonium obviously eliminates the risk. But in the short term, there would probably be greater security risks. Another criticism is the more general one that the nuclear industry has a track record of delivering late and wildly over budget — and often not delivering at all.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, and Paul Dorfman, British nuclear policy analyst at the University of Warwick, England, argued recently that this made all nuclear options a poor alternative to renewables in delivering low-carbon energy. “Even if these latest plans could be made to work, PRISM reactors do nothing to solve the main problems with nuclear: the industry’s repeated failure to build reactors on time and to budget,” they wrote in a letter to the Guardian newspaper. “We are being asked to wait while an industry that has a track record for very costly failures researches yet another much-hyped but still theoretical new technology.”

But this approach has two problems. First, climate change. Besides hydroelectricity, which has its own serious environmental problems, nuclear power is the only source of truly large-scale concentrated low-carbon energy currently available. However good renewables turn out to be, can we really afford to give up on nukes?

Second, we are where we are with nuclear power. The plutonium stockpiles have to be dealt with. The only viable alternative to re-use is burial, which carries its own risks, and continued storage, with vast expense and unknowable security hazards to present and countless future generations.

For me, whatever my qualms about the nuclear industry, the case for nuclear power as a component of a drive toward a low-carbon, climate-friendly economy is compelling. [A few months ago, I signed a letter with Monbiot and others to British Prime Minister David Cameron, arguing that environmentalists were dressing up their doctrinaire technophobic opposition to all things nuclear behind scaremongering and often threadbare arguments about cost. I stand by that view.]

Those who continue to oppose nuclear power have to explain how they would deal with those dangerous stockpiles of plutonium, whether in spent fuel or drums of plutonium dioxide. They have half-lives measured in tens of thousands of years. Ignoring them is not an option.

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. Originally published at Yale Environment 360.

Breakthrough Institute's mission is to accelerate the transition to a future where all the world's inhabitants can enjoy secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant planet. The Breakthrough Institute is a paradigm-shifting think tank committed to modernizing environmentalism for the 21st century. More at http://theBreakthrough.org

Reading through some responses to this article, I have come to the sad conclussion that some people are just dead set on hating Nuclear power, Period, and It doesn’t matter whether or not the technology has evolved past the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of earlier generations.

They point to costs, and if modular plants allay costs, they’ll point to nuclear waste, and if Fast Breeders consume waste, they lobby politicians to Kill Fast breeder research (The Integral Fast Reactor) and waste storage facilities (Yucca Mountain, Dry Casks).

Then the Nuclear Hate Cycle repeats all over again with them pointing to Costs and nuclear waste.

Paul, it’s not ‘hatred’ of nuclear. It’s the understanding that we are not ready for nuclear. I know that the American economic model is to trust to the invisible hand of the market to take care of everything but I don’t accept that ideology. First make sure that the waste issue is truly a non-issue. Second make sure that issues like Fukushima -Daiichi cannot happen. Third, consider the problems with uranium mining and dependency. Don’t go head first into the shallow part of the swimming pool. We are barely a year since Fukushima-Daiichi and already the call for nuclear power is gaining steam. Why don’t we hear the same drumbeat for solar? All I ever hear is how expensive solar is, how it can’t meet our energy needs, etc. Why don’t we jump into that pool first and when we solve the problems with nuclear, revisit the issue at that time. In other words, let’s use the precautionary principle first. And the blind greed one last.

Eric, isn’t it funny that the one country that has the largest part of it’s energy generated by nuclear is one of those that leasts trusts the invisible hand ?

It’s hard to have a clear view of the energy generation field, it’s seriously muddled by everybody defending his own option. But I still believe it’s quite possible.

However what I have to say probably looks slanted toward nuclear. But I really, really believe I’m just honestly stating the fact that emerge after much research. The fact that such a prominent environmentalist and scientist as James Lovelock has much the same point of view helps me believe I’m correct.

Lovelock recently took side in favor of shale gaz instead of nuclear, but not because he found bad points in nuclear that he had missed previously, but because he tought after Fukushima there would be no way to convince people in favor of nuclear, so that it’d be better to stop pursuing a lost cause, and concentrate on what could success.

– per generated TWh death statistics are hugely in favor in nuclear, even after something like Fukushima, even if we assume we missed some of the effect of radiation and there will be more cancer death than expected.

Nuclear suffers from the same effect as aviation, a big crash make everybody afraid, but on day to day it’s a *lot* safer than traveling by car. Since each roof generated just a little energy, a few worker falling from it make it already a lot more dangerous than nuclear. Roof work is classified amongst the most dangerous jobs.

Actually a worker in a nuclear plant is more secure a white collar in a bank (yes, it’s the official statitic, even including Fukushima and Chernobyl). Everything is so strictly controled inside a nuclear plant, than the work fatality is about 0.

– In effect, Nuclear competes against Coal and nothing else. Both are the cheap baseload power generation that runs all over the day. When the US stopped building new NPP, it immedialty started to build more coal. When I check the power generation in Germany, I see that the generation curve of nuclear and coal are exactly the same. Germany has still a lot of coal power generation (around 40% of total), and if they had not stopped those NPP last year every bit of nuclear generated power would have displaced coal power, not renewables.

That’s important because coal is very, very evil. The environnemental dammage is absolutly huge. But that’s not the only thing. North Carolina just proved in trial that the TVA coal causes premature mortality, asthma, chronic bronchitis and cardiopulmonary illnesses. After the spill 4 years ago, the Kingston, Tennessee residents have their local river polluted with arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and thallium. Some of the levels were still recently 200 times the autorised limits.

– Coal waste is worse than nuclear waste. Nobody wants any of the product listed above in his drinking water. But 130 million tons of coal waste are produced by the US every year. Opposite to the nuclear waste there is no possible way of disposing of such a huge amount of waste safely. Even if only one river is as badly polluted as the kingston one, groundwater pollution has been found all over the US.We are worried about the possibility of nuclear waste pollution in a very far away time scale, but the coal waste pollution is actually unmanageable today. Nuclear waste is actually around 10 thousand times smaller, so that can be managed. Not coal waste.

– Read Lovelock about nuclear waste if you don’t believe me but after around 200 years, when the fission product have recessed, nuclear waste is not a lot more dangerous than the original ore was. In Oklo in Gabon, a natural nuclear fission reactor just accidently appeared 2 billions years ago. Now the interested thing is that the waste just stayed there. It polluted nothing. After 2 billions years, it just was still were it initially appeared.

Recently crabs were fished in the vicinity of fukushima, and not a trace of last year caesium could be even measured. There was much talk some time ago about mesuring caesium in tuna. But actually the amount was so low that it’s only the ratio between caesium 134 and 137 that could really tell it was coming from fukushima, and not a remnant of the atmospheric weapons testing of the 60’s.

– When large scale energy production is concerned, the state of things doesn’t move fast. Something revolutionnary may be found tomorrow in a laboratory, but it’ll take at least 30 years before it’s large scale technology massively in use.

Coal is around 40% of the world electricity, Nuclear is 12%, Hydroelectric 13/14% and Solar is 0.25% (wind 2%). We can no longer say that’s only because no money has been spent on renewable, and it’d be easy to have much more. In the 2000-2009 timespan, around 1300 billions dollar have spent on renewable, only 140 billions dollar on nuclear.

Germany alone has spent more than 130 billions dollar on solar and is only 3% solar. Solar panel are cheaper today, yes, but German start to see scale problem that require other just as major spending to solve. Generation in winter is 4 to 5 times lower than in may, so the only solution is to have major overcapacity in summer (that even with cheaper panel is far from free) and storing as hydrogen. But that means massive investment in hydrogen generation, storage, burning turbines, where again the cost rises in the hundreds of billions of dollar. Hydrogen generators are very expensive today.

So the reasonnable thing today is to invest on nuclear to remove coal, the most polluting, the most unhealthly, the most CO2 generating power. And do more research about solar to develop solution than can scale to being the main power source at reasonnable cost. Maybe 20 years from now that will the good choice instead of nuclear. But not today.

Why did you randomly disagree with the free market ideology in your third sentence (and again at the end, by implication)? If there’s one thing I’m sure any commentator interested in energy policy already knows, it’s that no major decarbonisation project in energy works without government involvement; fossil fuels are still the cheapest option by far, and (to put it mildly) it sounds like none of us here are keen on that!

Uranium mining is only a problem if fast breeder reactors, like the one mentioned in this article, or thermal breeders, using thorium, are never deployed. Fast breeder technology is mature, but has never been commercialised before because there was no pressure on uranium supplies; the reason they are now becoming a serious commercial prospect is because future fuel availability is causing forward-thinking people to look for ways to use the ~98% of the fuel that’s currently just wasted (literally, it’s discarded as nuclear waste). It’s by no means an argument against fast breeder technology, though you imply it is.

Issues like Fukushima-Daiichi are arguably already solved;reactors dating to 1980 or later were designed to be passive safe, so they would suffer fewer problems if active systems were lost (e.g. coolant power fails). It’s worth noting that the two newest active reactors at Fukuhima, units 5 and 6 (also the largest units on the site) never posed a health hazard, it was the oldest three units (and smallest units). Japan’s newer power plants, including the nearby Fukushima-Daini (which suffered similar failures) likewise caused no public safety issues. It’s more than a little disingenuous to ignore the major safety improvements since the 1970s, pre-Three Mile Island, as an argument that it’s not feasible with modern technology.

How dangerous radiation is, is a related issue that could fill a whole textbook with arguments and counterarguments; but considering that even under LNT, the worst-case model, Fukushima’s radiation will cause around 150 deaths (worldwide) according to a recent study, there’s certainly scope for questioning why Fukushima causes so much fuss. Considering that an average 1GW coal plant, functioning completely normally, causes around 45,000 deaths over a 40-year operating life, any energy-related protest movement that’s more concerned about ending nuclear energy than ending coal energy, is missing a whole herd of elephants in the room!

You say there is no call for solar; I disagree, I hear a lot of positive news on solar power on a regular basis (more so than nuclear, actually, on lesser technical grounds). It gets (proportionately) far more support than other non-renewable energy systems; the main limitations thus far are the relatively small manufacturing base, and day-night intermittency. The former is solvable, is being solved, and will help bring costs down; the latter is a much bigger hurdle because regular changes in power supply put a lot of strain on the national grid, and currently the only ways of storing that energy are incredibly expensive and pretty inefficient (with no effective solutions on the horizon as yet).

I’m by no means against solar, but this isn’t a competition, and treating it like one just prolongs the fossil-fuel hegemony: every watt of energy not generated by fossil fuels is useful and necessary to prevent the very urgent problem of climate change.

I don’t think we have any choice. We have to adopt nuclear power and 4th generation nuclear power at that. It is the only practical way I can see of getting rid of nuclear wastes sitting all over the world from as far back as the Manhatten project that created the first nuclear bombs. Sad that we have to go this rout when wind power is coming in at around 8.3c per kWh (and is sold for around 20c/kWh) while solar panels have finally dropped to around a dollar per nominal watt and are now coming out with built in micro-inverters, allowing one to harvest all the power that each panel generates. If on the other hand, we build nuclear power plants that create yet more waste, we have basically thrown away our right to exist as a species. It is a little like watching people deny climate change after seeing “Chasing Ice“. As individuals we are incredibly clever. En Mass, unbelievably stupid.

The liquid fluoride thorium reactor, tested and proven albeit, not as long as the LMFR, seems VERY convincing. Aside from technical issues (from the ’60’s such as how to deal with pipes and valves in the extreme environment), has got to be the safest way to nuclear fission. No high pressures, no water to explode and inherent safety.

Kirk Sorensen worked with NASA and is now an avid supporter of this “old” technology.

As you can read from the article, Fast Breeder (and LFTR I think) tech, will get rid of all that waste and turn it into hundreds of years of power. LFtR Can’t melt down because it’s already in a liquid state, and it can’t blow up because it has no means to generate the hydrogen which is what actually blows up in a catastrophic accident.

The way forward is to abandon the aincient generation 1 and 2 technology. Why Run a coal driven Locomotive train when there are electric Mag-levs available?

jmdesp, a couple of items. First, Germany is not 3% solar. It has nearly 22 gigawatts of solar power feeding over 50% of its electric needs. If Germany can do this, imagine how Texas, Arizona, California, and other southwestern and western states could feed the entire country’s energy needs through solar panels and solar thermal plants. Again, my argument is that the reasonable thing to do is to invest in solar power, natural gas to augment any solar slowdowns, and do much more research on nuclear to see if one day there is no harmful waste, guarantees that there cannot be Fukushima-Daiichis, that we are not dependent on expensive and finite uranium, and that the cost of building a plant is not what it is today. In other words, just the reverse of your argument.

According to http://www.iea.org/stats/index.asp Germany’s 2009 electricity consumption was about 590,000 GWh, or about 67 GW average. Using your value of 22 GW (nameplate peak) of solar, and assuming a 15% capacity factor, that’s 3.3 GW average of solar, or 5% of the total demand, not 50%.

The instantaneous value may spike to 50% in June, but that just illustrates the extent to which a solar-rich portfolio will be dependent on fossil fuel backup.

I don’t have an exact price handy, but I seem to recall the German solar feed-in tariff being in the range of $0.30/kWh, which is a factor of 10x higher than the marginal cost of power from a coal plant (assuming the plant already exists, or is needed anyway for backup).

Capacity varied in 2011 from 17.3 to 24.8. Making an average between the two, the potential was 184 TWh. The number actually generated is 18 TWh

And also on that 50% day (during 1hour and a half), actually it was still only 30% of total generation. If you make the calculation right, that most that germany had to export almost 80% of it’s renewable production at a price around 5€/MWh (technically, sun and wind inject in the local network, so what was exported is more the production of the fossil power that could not be ramped down fast enough)

That means that for each *consumed* MWh, Germany was still producing an awful lot of CO2, since that fossil power was almost 100% coal and lignite (brown coal). OK, not 100%, there was a significant part of CO2 free nuclear. But if they go on with their nuclear free plan …

I’m not 100% against solar. It getting cheaper at a fast rate, and in some case, it’s production curve is reseaonnably matched against consumption.

In a country with a lot of air conditionning where the consumption is highest in summer, during the middle of the day, solar could be integrated in the grid in reasonnable condition.

But where the consumption is higher in winter, at a time where solar produces little, the question is left if the value of solar is worse it’s cost. At the very least, thermic solar really shoud be pushed first.

They are some solar water heater that are simple, don’t need subidies (or very little) and have a much higher efficiency than PV. Like the http://soloregon.com/ system (all the information is on line to build it yourself) or the http://sunnovations.com/ variant on it.

The German system of getting people to take up solar panels has been a huge success. Solar power in Germany is equal to about as much power as from 5 or so large coal fired power stations. It is much admired all over the world and Germany is very proud of it. Sad to say it is a scam on a number of levels.

William, I’m not sure I understand your argument. Taxation is a different subject. Solar power is working in Germany. I live in Texas. We have something like 320-340 days of sunshine. Can you imagine how much power we could generate from down here. Of course, the oil and gas industry is doing everything in its power to undermine solar.

What I was trying to get at in the article is that the problems with the uptake of solar power are no longer technical or even cost. Panels are getting down to around a dollar per nominal watt and even panels with built in micro inverters are running around 2.60 per watt. The affordability of a solar system depends on the regulations that the government sets out and when a government gives you a deal too good to be true (three times the rate for power you produce than for power you use) suspect a scam somewhere. In this case the German government is milking the system 6 ways from sunday. How much simpler (and eliminating the need for a separate meter that the customer has to pay for) if the government simply said any excess you produce will turn your existing meter backwards. In essence, the power company is paying you the same rate they charge you. At the end of the month or even the year, you would have a financial reconcilliation with the power company and either you would pay them or the converse. Now the power company has to maintain the lines that allow you to sell them electricity so a line charge would probably have to be part of the mix but it would be the same for the consumer and the consumer/producer. Imagine the situation of the German solar panel owner when his 20 years are over. Such a system also doesn’t discourage the power company from being your battery as the double metering system does.